Check out the post on Evan Bouchards page in the prospects here on hf. It has a great vid of Bouchard's abysmal defensive play and hockey sense. Not saying he's terrible its just alarming his tendencies.
I was going to post this on the other thread, but it's gone a little bit of a different direction, so I'll post it here.
So the stuff in that video is definitely not very inspiring, but we have to keep it in context. I think there's a tendency for humans to see examples like that and generalize from it. But we have to remember that those clips came from 2 games in the playoffs. 2 games is not an adequate sample size to make any kind of judgment about his game, and certainly not 2 games from the same part of the season. We would be totally in the wrong if we concluded that the video was all the evidence we need, and made a judgment off of that.
But even so, there are credible reasons why Bouchard
would be worse at that point in the season:
(1) He played a million minutes all season long, so it's likely that he was pretty wiped out by that point, and it seems pretty common that exhausted players make a lot of mental mistakes.
(2) After the trade deadline, Bouchard was "the guy" in a way that perhaps he was not used to. It's pretty likely that he felt a lot of pressure to carry the team in the playoffs, which meant cheating a lot defensively to get more offense in.. Also, we should expect that this factor got worse as the series went on and London continued to lose.
I know the NHL pushes the whole "gee shucks" humble farmboy type image for its players, but in reality potential top 5 draft picks have a strong desire to control games themselves. It's not surprising that Bouchard's reaction to adversity was to try to play more to his strengths to take control of the game. It wasn't a good decision, but I understand.
(3) The last reason is particularly believable because London got beaten by Owen Sound pretty handily. They got swept. So this was not Bouchard bringing down a good team so much as it was Bouchard failing to elevate a bad team.
(4) The idea that Bouchard was a defensive stalwart in the first place was oddly enough not really discussed until people started criticizing his defensive play. If Bouchard were as good defensively as people think he should be, he would be challenging Svechnikov. He's an offensive defenseman with fairly typical offensive defenseman flaws. He's sort of a mirror image Dobson, IMO, who can handle himself defensively but lacks that high offensive upside.